Description: When the body of an MI5 operative is found floating in the Thames, police frogmen find a significant clue nearby: Nikolai Sereyev, an MI5 informer and mid-level player in a Russian criminal organisation. Both men have been brutally murdered.

Andrew Harvey is tasked with finding his colleague’s killer, and quickly uncovers a plot to assassinate a visiting dignitary on British soil. No sooner has he scraped the surface of the case than the tables are turned and he becomes a pawn in a game of international brinkmanship that leads all the way to the Kremlin.

Harvey’s girlfriend, Sarah, also a secret service operative, is hot on his trail, but when she too becomes compromised, security chief Veronica Ellis knows there is only one man she can turn to. He’s a loose cannon, but she needs his help to rescue her agent and prevent a full-blown international incident. The trouble is, Tom Gray has gone to ground. Finding him is just the beginning.

Opening: PROLOGUE: 15 January 2016: Nikolai tried to spit the blood from his mouth but the damage they’d done to his lips made it impossible. The best he could do was let it dribble down his chin and onto his chest, where it slowly made its way between his man breasts before coming to rest on the top of his distended beer belly.

Jason Willard was working the Russian desk when he ended up a murderee in the Thames at the Embankment, his last appointment was with an informer…

The sanctions imposed on Russia following their annexing of Crimea had hit the country’s economy hard. [..] Far from learning their lesson though, the Russians had turned their eyes to Tagrilistan[*], one of the many former soviet republics bordering Russia to the south.”

This is, apparently, the latest in a series about Tom Gray, yet you wouldn’t realise that from looking at Goodreads site: usually series are well marked as such. However, that remiss fact is a perk in this particular instance, normally mid-series books wouldn’t get requested unless the preceding installments had been read and liked.

Baseline three testost-tosh, with way to much weapon information for my taste.

* For those who are geographically challenged, ‘Tagrilistan’ is a fictional country. The younguns tell me that philosophy, art, history, music and geography are defunct disciplines nowadays unless one wants to ‘speshulise’- talk about trying to make the informed feel like dinosaurs.